Cultural Split Screen

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Foster harmony. Enable beauty. Distill complexity. Oppose harm. It has been a long time since I began a Wall post with the four tenets of Distilled Harmony - those assertions by which I attempt to structure my life. Yet it has been a long time since the successes and failures of our culture have been revealed in such stark contrast. 

On one side of the screen a rocket rides on plumes of flame flinging humans once again towards the mystery of space. On the other, garish flames highlight humanity sinking into the thuggish behaviors from which we vainly struggle to free ourselves. 

I have no doubt that politicians, academicians, theologians, business leaders, friends and neighbors will attempt to distill the complexities that etched these strangely disparate realities upon our collective consciousness. Blame and praise will be assigned. Harm will be defined, and appropriate paths of support and opposition will be proposed. And each voice will echo with certainty. So distilling complexity and opposing harm will take center stage as we look back on a day defined by both human triumph and societal failure. 

It is here that I need to reaffirm that the four tenets of Distilled Harmony are hierarchical. Foster Harmony is the first and dominant tenet. When faced with any decision, that which fosters harmony is always preferable to that which ignites conflict and creates discord. Enable Beauty is the second tenet, following closely on the heels of foster harmony. Here too the decisions are often clear cut. That which makes our lives more beautiful must always be given preference over the coarse and merely pragmatic.   

The planning and creativity that led to the SpaceX side of the screen was informed by those first two tenets, and brought to fruition by tenets three and four. The destructive thuggish side of the screen reflects the awkward attempts prompted when we struggle backwards to tenets three and four to address the discord prompted by ignoring the primacy of foster harmony and enable beauty. 

Hopefully we will learn from this strange day, and will squeeze discord off the screen and free space for our better selves. 

Foster Harmony. Enable Beauty. Distill Complexity. Oppose Harm. 

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Composing Reality

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When I was a youngster, which means as long as I was living with my parents, my mother had a standard saying employed whenever we encountered one of life’s myriad wrinkles: “I wish I had a magic wand that I could wave and make everything all right.” Seems more than  little prescient, now that the virus has driven me to rereading all the Harry Potter books. However, Mom may not have realized it, but she really did have a magic wand.  Additionally, she bequeathed a belief in that wand to all of her children. The magic wand was a belief in, and a love of, the power of words.  

The clearest indication of that shared belief may rest in the fact that while we did have a television set back in those early days of the medium, I have few memories of our watching it. Perhaps early black and white versions of “Babes in Toyland” during Christmas. Maybe an occasional Cleveland Browns game in the Jim Brown era, late 1950s.  But nothing of a constant or repeating nature. A far more dominant memory is of a vacation with the entire family around a picnic table at a National Park, or under a tarp at Tower Hill Camp along Lake Michigan, - really, any vacation, anywhere with all of us in a shared space but each of us lost in our own book. That may sound like the current curse of a family sharing physical space but fully engaged with others via a digital screen. It was somehow quite different. Our noses may well have been buried in different books, but we were not texting, skypeing, zooming, or FaceTiming with others.  Our books were beloved fantasies, but reality - that which was solid - was peopled with, well, people. When we raised our eyes from the printed page there were real live faces surrounding us. 

A strange, and almost contradictory, extension of that history, is my personal love of?, addiction to?, obsession with?, the power of words.  For me, there is something dizzying about a blank page, an empty screen. It speaks of endless possibilities - perhaps of a chance to get it right, to make it clear.

That probably warrants an explanation. There is this space in my head, just beyond clear consciousness. It catches my attention in often unexpected ways. A unique blending of colors - in sunset, or among flowers in a roadside ditch. A phrase in the “always on” music that streams from my various devices. A pattern in the clouds, or the veins in a leaf. An arresting face, old, young or somewhere in between, at rest or frozen in some extreme.  Photos, paintings, tastes, movements. Anything. But suddenly there is this subtle buzz. A sharp inhalation. A realization that there is “something important going on here.”  Something I should remember. Something I should try to capture, to write about.  And that is the seduction of the blank page. The freedom to explore those possibilities, to bend words to give form and substance to those fleeting, hidden moments. To finally get it right.

The challenge is how to do that.  I think we can prepare to meet the challenge by attending to two major issues.  First, capture the moment, second master the vocabulary.  Let's pull them apart .

Capture the moment.

As I said these moments begging for expression often pop-up in unexpected ways, places and times. There was a time when I could say to myself, “Self, remember this.” And Self would oftentimes oblige. Sadly, Self is not what he used to be in this area, so I have brought some back-up on board. One bit of back-up is a 3.5 x 5.5 inch notebook with a little loop where you can clip on a pen. I call it Brain and, when I remember to bring along the pen, I can jot down in Brain those little moments that Self is wont to forget.  I do realize that it is mostly the case these days that we all now carry around in our pockets additional back-up in the form of portable audio and video recorders. And stopping to talk into my phone or snap a picture, sometimes works. But, for me, I often need to see the “something important is going on here ” moment as words on a page - little nudges that can bring me back to that important moment.  So in a moment of unabashed hucksterism let me recommend the software app called Evernote. The icon is a white circle background with a green portrait of an elephant head in the center. I believe that is not a political statement, but is rather a reference to the elephant’s prodigious memory.

My environment is pure Mac, but I see favorable reviews of Evernote from PC Magazine, so I assume that there is a PC version available.  Evernote lets you write long or short notes about whatever you are interested in saving. No big deal, I realize. But what is cool is that Evernote shares what you write across all your devices. So if I write a note on my phone, the note shows up on my laptop and my tablet as well, and so on amongst all the devices. You can, the app informs me, add pictures, voice recording, etc.  So there is, as usual these days, more power in the app than I need or use. But what is important to me is that it lets me capture those ephemeral moments in relatively painless, easily stored ways. And that, after all, is the primary objective - having something to step in, when Self and Brain are challenged, and help me remember that something important or interesting is skating around just beyond the edges of my consciousness, and I might want to think about that space bit more and perhaps write about it here on The Wall. Which takes us to the second major issue: 

Master the vocabulary.

I suppose we all tend to remember the “good old days,” and bemoan the predations of the modern world upon time-honored traditions, beliefs and values. Often those backward glances are distorted by the rose-colored mists of memory. It has taken more than several trips down memory lane to confirm for me that Kraft macaroni and cheese never really did taste good. 

Still sometimes recall gets it right, so trust me on this one: when it comes to building a rich vocabulary, texting really is evil.  I realize that it has its place - like passing important information to a friend when the person you are trying to contact is actually using their phone to talk to someone.  And yes, I do know that one can now send a SMS message of 918 characters - that will, however, be broken up into fragments if you exceed 160 characters. Is that supposed to make me feel better? Remember, we are talking characters - punctuation marks, spaces, etc., are all characters and each one counts against the “allowed” number of characters! OMG! LOL! Emojis- yet another step away from the written word - seem to get counted rather randomly. The point is this - trying to make a message as short as possible encourages one to limit, as opposed to build, your vocabulary. The old way was better. 

Ah, yes. You may - or may not - remember it: the daily or, depending on your school or grade, weekly vocabulary test.  You sat at your desk. Ruled paper at the ready. Numbers 1 through 15 on the first 15 lines. The teacher began: 

1. Discover: To find something new or previously unknown. Discover.
   
2. Fragment: A piece of something larger. Fragment.
   

They would pause after each word, gazing around the room until each face reflected completion or despair, and then pronounce the next word.  So it would go until you had written each of the words, or at least your best effort at spelling it. You handed in your paper, or, more embarrassing, swap papers with the kid across the aisle, to be checked.  Vocabulary tests were - in hindsight - great. If any of you have in your family, age appropriate children aching for another “stay home, wash your hands” activity, this would be a lovely time to implement vocabulary tests. There is however a better way - and that is, of course, Mom’s magic wand; reading.

Reading not only builds a broad vocabulary, it also demonstrates the affinity that certain words have for each other, and the affinity of word clusters for emotions and locations and phenomena.  And since the task of an author is to sculpt art from the synthesis of a magical moment, vocabulary, and emotional affinity - what better addiction for a writer than reading?  Books let us wander through lands and languages, genders and genres, eras and ideas, vernacular and idiom, etching the best words onto our linguistic palettes ready to be liberated in service to our own compositions, our own attempts to define and better understand reality. To capture in depth those unique ephemeral moments that Self, Brain, and Evernote have sketched for us.

And since I find myself here in the company of a delightful word “palette,” I should point out that “learning your colors” should expand far beyond the simple color wheel or the mnemonical friend of the rainbow, Roy G. Biv. Just as we should treasure each new member of our linguistic vocabulary, we need to cherish each burst of color that life allows us. We were walking down one of Florence’s winding streets - eyes already overwhelmed with Titian, Michelangelo, Fra Angelico and the gang, when this window peeked out from a storefront no more than 8 or 10 feet wide:

Oh, my. A thesaurus for the eyes. I am a bit overfond of bold, pure colors - and these were Olympic quality versions of the same. But seeing fingerprints and tool marks etching trails in the geometric divisions somehow emphasized the tantalizing notion that each color could clamber out of its brilliant little corral and blithely co-mingle with its previously pristine neighbor, turning this magic square of 42 glittering displays into a physical reality that software geeks would come to call “millions of colors." 

So, just as we build our verbal vocabulary by reading whatever we can get our hands on, taking vocabulary tests, and yes, doing crossword puzzles, we can build our visual vocabulary by paying similar attention to color - wherever we can find it. From nature's painting of sunrise and sunset, to the commercial rainbows of the color swatches in the paint sections at Home Depot, Lowes, Sherman-Williams, et. al. Stop. Attend. Build your visual vocabulary.  Buy some sketchbooks and the set of markers the catches your eye. Now doodle. In color. You don’t have to draw something. Just doodle. Some “thing” may emerge, or not. It really doesn’t matter. Again we are just building vocabulary.

The whole idea here is that when those “something important is going on here” moments flit across the landscape of your consciousness you are not caught with an empty quiver. You reach in and words and colors pour out ready to compose reality; to capture the moment, perhaps enhance it, polish it, refine it, share it. Or maybe to just relive it to lighten a quiet evening or a rainy afternoon.

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The Utopian Tranquility of the Virus

Spring unfolds around us, 

Blithely unaware of  

Social distancing. 

Blossoms. 

Birds. 

Rabbits. 

Rainbows. 

All seem to be 

Doing just fine 

In our absence. 

This does not so much 

Argue for a world 

Without humanity, 

As it advocates 

For a humanity 

Without our 

Cloying, 

Existential, 

Arrogance. 

The Many Flavors of Love

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I was only a paragraph or two into this post when it became patently obvious to me: You can take the professor out of the lecture hall, but you can’t take the lecture out of the professor.  What follows would be one, maybe even two, lectures in my old Criticism of the Entertainment Media class. It was a class that was great fun to teach. It was a three-hour seminar in which we would watch TV and movies, listen to music and talk about how those messages influenced us and our society. I haven’t taught it for years. Apparently I have missed doing so.

So grab a beverage and some snacks. This is a long one.

A few posts ago I mentioned Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her 5 stages of death/grieving. It is a fascinating area of study, my favorite pop culture treatment of which is Bob Fosse's 1979 film All That Jazz.  Beautifully done, really depressing - so not something I would recommend for viewing here in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. I mean, if you want to get depressed  just watch the news.  Instead I thought it would be far more uplifting to think about what I am calling the many flavors of love.

Let me point out right here at the beginning that I realize that, unlike the five stages of death, there are far more than five flavors of love, more like the 28 flavors of ice cream featured at the old Howard Johnson’s restaurants, or Baskin-Robbin’s original 31 flavors. In truth, love probably comes in as many different flavors as there are people in love, but in lieu of a quantum computer capable of gathering and crunching that data set, I’ve decided to narrow the field a bit to just those flavors I want to talk about.  Also, as an initial disclaimer, while I will somewhat mimic Kübler-Ross’s chronological model, through a few stages or “flavors,” of love, it is best to keep in mind that love has the unique ability to insert any flavor into our lives at any time.  “Puppy love” may last a lifetime; pair-bonding love may shatter in the face of the thunderbolt and the thunderbolt may sweep away, only to rumble endlessly like a distant storm just over the horizon. So, here we go.

In this post we are going to think about five primary flavors or guises of that most central and powerful of all human emotions - love. I call them Elementary Love, Darwinian Love, The Thunderbolt, Pair Bonding Love, and Beyond Happily Ever After Love. Hopefully, my reasoning will become clear. Unlike many of the posts here on The Wall, this one is liberally peppered with exemplary links. I hope you not only enjoy them, but they help clarify what I am trying to say.

Elementary Love.  And by that I do not mean “elementary” as in “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Rather I mean elementary as in elementary school, because this was often where we first encountered our first “significant other.” Back in the pre-historic times before fetal music therapy,  pre-preschool, enriched preschool, and all-day daycare, kindergarten was often our first experience with a group of mixed gender age-mates other than our family. And still much of our attention in kindergarten was given over to learning colors, shapes, and a brief dabbling with numbers. Remember, this was back when Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood was just a gleam in Fred Roger’s eye and Sesame Street was an undeveloped property out in the burbs. So elementary school’s first grade was often the first place we encountered age mates with intriguing gender differences. Brothers and sisters didn’t count because they were competitors first, and the fact that they were boys or girls barely registered.

I can still remember my first “elementary" girlfriend. She was completely unaware of my existence, let alone the "special relationship" I created for us. She did not even go to my elementary school. I went to Jefferson Elementary, a swift bike ride around the corner from my house. With the last name Fitzgerald, I later came to realize that she went to the local Catholic school, somewhere seemingly far away. But she lived right across the street from my school’s playground. She was “black Irish,” raven black hair, bright blue eyes. Sometimes I could catch glimpses of her when we went out to recess.  I would hustle off to school early in hopes of seeing her leave home. Yes, I was a second grade stalker - smitten, but silent. I did not ever speak to her. Later, I came to feel a strong kinship with Charlie Brown and his unrequited love for the little red-haired girl.

This kind of  “puppy love” seems to remain dominant through much of elementary school, and altho’ “special friends” are occasionally acknowledged, unrequited relationships seem to dominate, largely I think, because nobody seems to know what “requited” would entail.

Darwinian Love. This is where “puppy love” morphs into “You dog you!” and it is also when junior high and middle school teachers begin to lose their minds. We are talking about the drive to perpetuate the species, the onslaught of hormones, the reign of eros, or, more plainly, sex and lust. This aspect of love never really goes away, but when it comes stomping in for the first time, eros seems to drive just about everything else about human relationships out of the mind - or at least tosses it into the backseat! See, see what I mean? 

The initial manifestation of the the more raunchy aspect of love is manifested differently in different cultures. In some often "clothes optional cultures”  it is seen as a natural progression, and nobody gets terribly bent out of shape. Sort of perched in the middle ground are cultures that give youngsters in this weird relatively free reign to explore sexuality, but then sort of draw a line in the sand and say - “OK, now you chose. Stay outside the faith and live like the “others” or come inside and abide by the traditions of our society.  The Amish Rumspringa is a prime example. 

In an unrelated, but relevant example, I remember my mother telling me that she - a fairly vanilla Protestant - was discussed by my father’s relatively strict Mennonite community as being “nicht von unsere” - “not from ours.” Such theological and philosophical distinctions often had a central place for some subcultures’s notions of “coming of age” in matters of love and sexuality.  In other cultures, interestingly often "clothing exceptionally ornate" societies, sexual activity is surrounded by incredibly complex rituals, manners and customs. I’m sure there are Ph.D. dissertations out there full of complex explications that soon make the reader forget that they are reading about sex. Equally interesting are those celibate sects - not sexes - that seem to bypass sexuality altogether.  I am thinking of the Shakers of the 17 and 18 hundreds and contemporary Jainism. Being a 70-year-old male raised in America, I have a hard time imagining an intimate romantic relationship that doesn’t include an erotic component - but maybe that’s just my “unevolved” self talking. I have less trouble understanding this next flavor:

Thunderbolt Love

I steal this title from the Francis Ford Coppola film The Godfather.  Michael Corleone, the young scion of the Corleone mob family, is hiding out in Sicily after making a mob hit back home. One day while walking down a dusty lane he sees a lovely young woman - Apollonia Vitelli - and is, according to the film’s dialogue, “struck by the thunderbolt.” Which, according to a The Godfather fan site is "a powerful, almost dangerous longing in a man for a particular woman” - or one would assume vice-versa, a powerful, dangerous longing in any one for another. And Michael does, that very day, follow the woman home and asks her father for permission to court her, the object being very proper matrimony.  

The arts love the thunderbolt. Stretching all the way back to Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet, 1594-5-ish, up through its 20th century incarnation West Side Story, 1957, Broadway, 1961 film release. We see the theme repeated in films like Casablanca, 1942, Titanic, 1997, Love Story, 1970 novel and film, and, well, name your own tragic love affair flick. Songwriters are equally enamored with the genre. Maybe we should start with a classic ode to the thunderbolt from West Side Story:

• Maria

And here are a few examples from the country-western world which seems to love the thunderbolt:

• I Fall to Pieces - Patsy Cline, 1961 
• I Can’t Help it If I’m Still in Love With You - Hank Williams, 1951
• He stopped loving her today - George Jones, 1980

The defining characteristic of thunderbolt love is that you don’t see it coming, you don’t plan for it, and there is nothing you can do about it. It can strike when least expected. At a sock-hop in the junior high gym, in the grocery store aisle, in a coffee shop, in the midst of statistics class, while mowing the grass, at an AARP meeting, anywhere. It is, as mentioned, dangerous because the thunderbolt has absolutely no respect for what you may have planned for your life. The thunderbolt pays no attention to the current state of your existence. And as we can see from the above musical examples, the thunderbolt also tends to leave someone in pain. The thunderbolt clear-cuts the forest of your plans. The thunderbolt is the nuclear fission of love, laying waste to all other emotions and obligations, and like nuclear events, leaves in its wake a lingering half-life of years, decades, even longer.  Or as Emily Dickinson wrote to Mary Bowles in 1862, “The heart what it wants - or else it does not care."

Pair-Bonding Love

While the thunderbolt love is the nuclear fission of love, pair-bonding love is the fusion. It may well start with the same same heady exhilaration as fission, but somehow manages to avoid the destructive termination of that reaction, and leads us gently to “happily-ever-after.”   Not strangely then the happily-ever-after of pair-bonding love underlies many fairy tales - particularly the “Disneyized” sanitized versions that children are raised on today. But we certainly cannot accuse Walt of creating the theme.  We can look to Shakespeare again, his appropriately titled All’s Well That Ends Well and A Midsummer’s Night Dream can both be seen as advocating pair-bonding love, with some admitted stumbles along the way. Jane Austin’s works published as the 1700s turned into the 1800s follow those same Shakespearian paths taking our protagonists over some twisted paths, but eventually leading them to the same promise of happily-ever-after.

The “stay-at-home” decrees elicited by the current COVID-19 pandemic have prompted me to purchase and reread the 18 novels of Louis L’Amour’s Sackett novels, (published 1950s through the 1960s) often lauded as quintessential “westerns,” along with the equally renowned in the genre, Zane Grey’s Riders of The Purple Sage (1912) which wikipedia touts as “the most popular western novel of all time.” They were all still quite readable - though the anti-Mormon riffs in Riders may well get in the way for contemporary readers. But the thing that surprised me most was the fact that if you stripped away "the bulls and the blood, the dust and the mud, the boots and the chaps, and the cowboy hats” you don’t get so much a thing they call rodeo, as you get a thing they call a romance.  That really shouldn’t surprise me.  My mother turned me on to an author named James Oliver Curwood  who wrote “adventure novels” of the great Northwest - Mounties, fur trappers and all that - between 1900 and 1931. Again, strip away the snowshoes, blizzards, and the normative demeaning characterizations of indigenous peoples of the times, and you get romances with the protagonists walking off, hand-in-hand, into a happily-ever-after up in the trackless forests of the great northwest.

Both music and video have become somewhat subdued when it comes to the depiction of pair-bonding love over the last couple of decades. Although I must admit right up from that that may not be so much the media as it is my own blinders: I don’t do dark and I don’t do violent. And I don’t do programs aimed at 20-somethings. So those biases may well have unnaturally restricted my sampling of media models. Dystopian zombies? I don’t think so, thank you. And in my 40 years as a media professor, I sort of saw part of my job as steering my students away from “the lowest objectionable programming” cranked out by the industry, and toward some of the truly exceptional work being produced. Those of you out there who took my classes may remember that I got away with teaching entire semesters devoted to M*A*S*H and Northern Exposure! But, still, pair-bonding love did not go completely unnoticed in the commercial media. While cops and docs did dominate most of the last half of the TVs 20th century, the sitcoms like I Love Lucy (1951- 1957), Leave It to Beaver (1957 - 1963) and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952 - 1966, starring teenage heart throb Ricky Nelson) eventually gave way to some more sophisticated representatives of the genre, domestic comedies, featuring the notion of pair-bonding love.  Family Ties (1982 - 1989) with Michael J. Fox, The Wonder Years (1988 - 1993, perhaps most easily remembered for Joe Crocker’s version of the Lennon-McCartney theme song, With A Little Help From my Friends) and the recently besmirched The Cosby Show (1984 - 1992) were all anchored by loving pair-bonded parents guiding their children through the challenges and foibles of “coming of age.”

The pop music industry, aimed more at an audience in the throes of the thunderbolt didn’t fair as well when it came to happily-ever-after hits. The Marty Robbins’ 1959 hit, The Hanging Tree, finally gets around to pair-bonding in pursuit of happily-ever-after, but only in the last reprise of the chorus.  But for the most part pop music still featured love songs either firmly entrenched in thunderbolt, like Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 Physical or any number of love songs aimed at either establishing an amorous relationship, or bemoaning the demise of same.

So it becomes obvious that cultural courtship in America, in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st anyhow, is a mediated kind of courtship. It ranged from the personal messages carried by the awkward “mix tape” of cassette recorders in the 1960s to the bingeing on corporate models of romantic messages made possible by the internet, and just about anything in between. And so love, it seems, was, and to a certain extent is, primarily relegated to the first four flavors already discussed. There is, however, a fifth flavor. One less treated specifically as a category of love, but which nonetheless, is where most people spend most of their lives: Love Beyond Happily-Ever-After.

Love Beyond Happily-Ever-After  or  Someone Has to Like Me Best

So, in happily-ever-after the pair-bonded lovers, however configured, ride, sail, walk, fly off into the sunset. Fade theme up, then down, fade sound and picture to black. Roll credits.

What happens then?

Well, in my Criticism of Entertainment Media class back in 1980s and 1990s, in commercial media anyhow, soap operas happened then. There are daytime soaps like the initially radio old timers, The Guiding Light and All My Children, now off in soap opera heaven, and the current video sole survivors, The Bold and the Beautiful, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, and The Young and The Restless, where college students and stay-at-home caregivers finally find common ground. There were also nighttime soaps, which fought the designation. Those got their start back with Dallas, (CBS, 1978 -1991) swiftly imitated by Falcon Crest,  (CBS, 1981 - 1990) and Dynasty (ABC, 1981 - 1989). All of these programs address the idea that what happens behind the curtain of happily-ever-after, is rarely love. Love, or more often lust, becomes simply a subplot device used in service to the dominant theme of all the programs - the pursuit of money and power.  The dominant, almost contemporary, example of the genre - Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011 - 2019) no doubt owes much of its success to the Internet. One no longer has to agonize over the summer waiting to learn “Who shot JR?” You can just lock the door and lose a week or two shivering in delight and secure in the knowledge that “winter is coming” but you can just hit pause whenever you want. The softer, more gentle notion of where love actually goes beyond happily-ever-after is treated far more rarely.

On television The Waltons, (CBS, 1972 - 1981) followed a dominant theme of how caring and compassion were invaluable tools in addressing life’s challenges. The program also provided what was perhaps the clearest visual trope for Love After Happily-Ever-After.  where the family bids each other good night at the end of the clip. Little House on the Prairie (NBC 1974 -1983) followed suit. Both, however, were preceded by Bonanza (NBC, 1959 - 1973. One of the first TV series produced in color) in which the three-time widowed patriarch, Ben Cartwright, sought to teach his sons the humane values of tolerance and compassion.  While there was obviously no pair-bonding love for Ben in Bonanza [As a matter of fact, one came to realize that should Ben fall in love, the woman’s days were numbered.] the program did depict how love, given the opportunity, should go after happily-ever-after.  What became clear in these video depictions was that Love Beyond Happily-Ever-After was presented on television as a family affair - and yes, the was a program by that name - not a romantic relationship. 

But here in the 2020s I’m thinking that the more realistic and compelling flavor of love is one alluded to in the 1996 Nichols/May film The Birdcage, based on the 1978 French/Italian film La Cage aux Folles.  The film with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane is brilliant, filled with laugh-out-loud moments and well worth the viewing [comes “free” on Amazon Prime.] But I would draw our attention to a single, almost throwaway line towards the end of the film. In true French farce style much of the film centers on the confusion surrounding a gay, drag nightclub owning couple pretending to be straight in order to avoid any issues that might arise as their son marries the daughter of a right wing conservative senator. The germane line is spoken by the largely ignored wife of the senator as the protagonists seek to avoid the press by exiting the nightclub in drag. As the gender-bending, emotionally-confused, gaudily-costumed, entourage stream toward the exit the wife asserts “Someone has to like me best.” 

And that, I would content, is the epicenter of this “Beyond-Happily-Ever-After” flavor of love.  As our pair-bonded lovers stroll off into the sunset up to their castle in the clouds, they soon find themselves confronted by life as it really is. It seems that someone has to pay the rent on the castle. Which means unless the previous royal couple had left a nice trust fund somebody needs to work, maybe a dual couple working arrangement? And oops, here come little princes and princesses who need to be cared for and taught to be good little royals.  Duty calls.

This not to say that our beyond-happily-ever-after couple love each other less, but it does say that their lives become far more complicated. Job and family make significant withdrawals from that  wealth of love that had seemed so never-ending. It seems “normal” that the job and the kids should make significant demands on affection and energy. But the danger is that those demands, originally met to support the dreams of the "pair-bonded, happily-ever-after couple" come to supersede those dreams, the “beyond-the-relationship demands" become the new number one leaving someone in the couple to assert “someone has to like me best.”

It should not surprise us then that the desire for “things the way they used to be” or “ the way they things should be” or "the way things should have been" pop up in our media. Let’s look at music again:

Leeuhenbach Texas  [Or Let’s Get Back to the Basics of Love, 1977, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson]

Kisses Sweeter Than Wine - Jimmie Rogers, 1960 version of a 1950 Weavers song.

Longer - Dan Fogelberg, 1979

Lucky Old Sun  -  Frankie Laine, 1949

So, love, then. Ya gotta love it.  More flavors than we could ever dream of.  It fills your heart, and then breaks it, over and over. We see it everywhere. Warm, gentle springtime. Hot sultry summers. The gold and crimson robes of autumn. Winter’s white and crystal wrappings. It lies somewhere in every work of art ever created. We think we know it, and then we think we stand shriven and clueless. Love is the iconic “can’t live with it, can’t live without it” drumbeat of humanity.

For those of you still awake - oh, wait, I’m not in a classroom. For those of you still playing along, I’ll leave you with a couple of last thoughts. First, and admitting to the cardinal sin of forgetting where I stole this; a story from somewhere out there on the Internet, a story that if not true, should be:

Karsten Tüchsen Hansen, 89, and Inga Rasmussen, 85, meet at the border between Germany and Denmark. He cycles from the German side; she drives from the Danish side. The couple have met every day since the police closed the border to contain the coronavirus, maintaining a modicum of social distance while keeping their romance alive. “Love,” say Mr. Tüchen Hansen says, "is the best thing in the world.”

And so, on that “lovely" note let me leave you with one last song, to focus us happily out there beyond COVID-19:

Happy Trails to You!

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